The past decade has yielded a small, yet robust crop of studies on food and drink in the Hebrew Bible. Andrew Abernethy’s contribution to this increasing yield looks at the role of food and drink in the literary structure of Isaiah, focusing on the sections that have been identified as major cruxes in the book and asking how food and drink contribute to Isaiah’s message.

Abernethy devotes the first chapter to surveying some of the recent scholarly approaches to the topic of food in biblical literature, and outlines his own method as a sequential-synchronic approach. The second chapter focuses on Isaiah 1 as an introduction to the whole book, looking at how food and drink function in its rhetoric. This study of Isaiah 1 sets the stage for later discussions on how these first food themes are fleshed out in Isaiah 2-35 (ch. 3) and 36-37 (ch. 4).

David Nirenberg’s Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition is self-avowedly a history of thought (p. 7), a history that seeks to demonstrate how the idea of the ‘Jew’ has been used as a derogatory shorthand for anyone who is ‘other.’ To use the example from the epigraph to the book, why is it that the 17th century English poet George Herbert can write that anyone who loves “this world’s delights before true Christian joy” has made a “Jewish choice”? How is it that Jews, Jewishness, and Judaism have become, in the history of Western Tradition, shorthand for all manner of “sins” like small-mindedness and greed?

As Nirenberg concedes in the introduction, the three thousand year scope of his investigation will be problematic for some historians. Read the rest of this entry »

This is a report on a paper presented by Prof N. T. Wright as a keynote address at the 1st St Andrews Graduate Conference for Biblical and Early Christian Studies, 15 June 2011. The conference theme was “Authoritative Texts and Reception History”. The programme of the conference is available here.

The conference facebook page is here. This blog’s facebook page is here.

Wright’s paper addresses what he views as the most contested and problematic moment in reception history: “The moment when those first-century Jews who believed that Jesus of Nazareth was Israel’s Messiah and the world’s Lord began to re-read their scriptures with this belief as the controlling filter.” The paper is a re-presentation of the main issues examined in Wright’s book, Scripture and God’s Authority. As is suggested by the title, Wright emphasizes that the authority of scripture is not in the text itself; rather, the authority of God is somehow mediated through the text. Read the rest of this entry »

2018.06.08 | Andrew Ter Ern Loke. The Origin of Divine Christology. Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series 169. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. 249 pp. Reviewed by Kai Akagi, Japan Bible Academy. Andrew Loke’s The Origin of Divine Christology continues the stream of works on early high Christology of the neue religionsgeschichtliche Schule by arguing that […]

2018.05.07 | Adams, Sean A. and Seth M. Ehorn, eds. Composite Citations in Antiquity: Jewish Graeco-Roman, and Early Christian Uses. Vol 1. London; New York: Bloomsbury, 2016. Reviewed by R. Jarrett Van Tine, University of St. Andrews. This work is the first of a two-volume set addressing the curious literary technique of composite citation (CC). […]

2018.02.04 | Daniel L. Smith-Christopher, Micah: A Commentary. OTL. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2015. Reviewed by Mark Glanville. Daniel L. Smith-Christopher has produced a new commentary on Micah in the Old Testament Library series. This commentary follows an earlier commentary on Micah in this respected series by James Luther Mays, published in 1976.1 The body of […]

2018.01.02 | Jörg Frey and John R. Levison, eds. The Holy Spirit, Inspiration, and the Cultures of Antiquity: Multidisciplinary Perspectives. Ekstasis 5. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2017. Reviewed by Jesse D. Stone, University of St Andrews. This volume gathers together essays produced as part of an interdisciplinary project on the historical roots of early Christian pneumatology […]